At the time of filing the present patent application there continues to be remarkable growth in telephone-based information systems. Recently emerging examples are telemarketing operations and technical support operations, among many others, which have grown apace with development and marketing of, for example, sophisticated computer equipment. More traditional are systems for serving customers of such as large insurance organizations. In some cases organizations develop and maintain their own telephony operations with purchased or leased equipment, and in many other cases, companies are outsourcing such operations to firms that specialize in such services.
A relatively small technical support operation serves as an example in this specification of the kind of applications of telephone equipment and functions to which the present invention pertains and applies. Consider such a system having just one, or at most a few call-in centers, as opposed to a large organization having country-wide matrix of call-in centers. One of the differences that might be noticed in this example is that such a relatively small operation will be less likely to have an on-premises telephony switch, and would thus rely on an off-premises switch. In the patent applications listed above as related to the present application call-in centers were described having a telephony switch as a part of the Customer Premises Equipment (CPE), and inventions are taught and claimed in those applications related to such relatively large-scale systems. In the present application an invention in various aspects is taught and claimed relative to call-in centers having no telephony switch as a part of the CPE.
It is generally known in the art to provide computer functions as a part of telephone switching equipment, although there are many inventions that have been patented relative to such functionality, and there are many patent applications pending related to such equipment, including the pending applications listed above. It is also known in some later technical development to integrate computers with telephony switches, and several such applications are known to the inventors and are disclosed and taught in the related patent applications to which reference has been made. Such computer enhancement is known in the art as Computer Telephone Integration (CTI), and is in the realm of CTI that the present invention also applies in a broad sense.
Very broadly speaking, it is desirable in the art wherever call-in centers are operated to provide quick and efficient service to callers (although this may not be always readily apparent to the callers, who still in most such systems find themselves stuck on hold in queues for long periods). There is nevertheless much inventive work being done to enhance and improved such systems, and much of this development is in the area of CTI, as might be expected. It is in this area that the present invention applies, and it is an object of the present invention to provide enhanced CTI functionality for call-in centers having no telephony switch as a part of the CPE, wherein calls are routed to telephones at such a call-in center by one or more telephony switches not a part of the CPE.